I want to take this opportunity to explore some ideas that have been nagging at me for a few months now. In brief, I want to examine the treatment of the 'ordinary' by both designers and artists in order to consider how and why industrial designers, specifically, often define their mission as creating the ordinary, or common stuff of daily life. This will primarily be a philosophical and conceptual argument, though I think it bears on how designers frame their practices more generally.

What brings me to this topic is the recent proliferation of artists who seem to be taking ordinary, material culture as a point of departure for examining the role of the 'ordinary' in late twentieth century life. More specifically, I want to undertake to understand why artists are so compellingly exploring the uncanniness of ordinary things while industrial designers— whose mission it is to really provide the ordinary things— seem unlikely to produce things similarly charged. I am thinking of artists such as Andrea Zittel, Jorge Pardo, Jeff Koons, Carrie Mae Weems and others (this list is hardly comprehensive or coherent, but it is a start). It seems to me that each is successfully reframing everyday life and its objects, jarring them out of their ordinary contexts and eliciting in the process greater meanings from them. This is hardly a new practice, though it is important, I feel, to understand why it is so rampant today. Clearly, Marcel Duchamp's urinal and drying rack, or Meret Oppenheim's boots sewn together, inaugurated the gesture of recontextualizing common objects and defamiliarizing the familiar by exhibiting it in a museum context. First, then, I will quickly attempt to make sense of why art practice might be so suffused with the ordinary; next, I will try to unpack what designers are doing; finally, I hope to make some sense of this.

I want to posit five quick explanations for why it is possible for artists to make so much of the 'ordinary' and how they manage to charge it with so much portentousness

...By placing an ordinary object into a museum/gallery context, the artists force us to contemplate at some length the things that we too often overlook. They oblige us to consider the overlooked, the unnoticed, the merely functional, or the tossed aside. They charge the built environment and its elements with new-found mystery, allure, significance, or challenge.

...Many of the artists are also adept at placing these common objects in uncommon, or better, uncanny, scenarios. They rewrite the script of the object to the public in ways that industrial designers rarely have the chance to. Instead, it is typically advertising that get the opportunity to tell the stories that create the context for the object's reception.

...These artists reveal the Real as a 'ready-made.' Their common scenarios and objects expose the always already mediated nature of life today. By 'staging' the ordinary they make us reflect upon the impossibility of any real, or authentic experience.

They also unpeel the layers of race, class, and gender interests that typically get elided into a monolithic, homogeneous mono-culture. This unmasking of the normal as "anything but" enters the common object into the contested terrain of contrasting visions of the normal.

...And finally, the placement of ordinary objects in extraordinary— that is, museum— contexts tends to infect them with an aura that belies that serial, mass-produced origin. If the museum is, to some degree, the bastion of contemplative, original art, the common object is everything but that. In contrast to what Walter Benjamin argues, the museumification of the mass-produced imbues it with an aura that it never really had. It is a crazy paradox of the precious, common object.

While I have grossly over-generalized to make these points, there is something valuable to be taken from them. What I think that contemporary artists are successfully doing is using the ordinary object to reframe our perception, experience, and understanding. They are shifting the sands under our old firm footing, and they are doing so by deploying the common matter of our everyday lives.

Now, to turn to the industrial designers, who are my real interest. It has been a truism for me (up until recently) that what makes industrial design so compelling is that it is responsible for creating the common background and material culture of our lives. Designers do more than that— they create highly emotional, functional, and beautiful things, too— but I have always considered it the most intriguing part of the mission. However, the point I want to make here— and it is a stretch— is that in some funny way the one thing that designers are actually incapable of producing is the common, the ordinary, or the un-noticed. I will suggest that the common is unreachable, and that when an object attains that status it is at the expense of the designer him/herself. Furthermore, it is more likely by historical accident than by design fiat.

Some examples will help me to make my point: the box fan, the squeeze tube, the styrofoam cup, the wire hanger. My guess is that nobody here could name the designer of them, but are they not some of the most lasting, important, and common objects of our time? Their simplicity, reliability, and ubiquity make them obvious design benchmarks; they have become anonymous, but that is precisely the quality that I appreciate in them. They have also erased successfully the trace of their origins. So why is it impossible for contemporary industrial designers to accomplish as much?

It seems to me that two factors are operative. The first— commodity product cycles— is the most determinative. The manufacturers' need to bring out newer, better, and sexier commodities on a regular basis in order to boost sales restrict the possibility of any one product lasting long enough to become common (though some still do, obviously, despite this constraint). What is necessary to create the anonymous, ubiquitous object is the passage of time; it is therefore impossible to predetermine the commonness in advance. It simply happens, and that is all. It is not a designer's decision.

The other factor that destroys the commonality of objects is what I will call, borrowing from others, the 'signature effect.' Building a canonical, art-historical culture for industrial design requires, to some degree, the establishment of stars, celebrities, retrospectives, and the like. The effect of this, however, is to 'paste' the 'signature' of the designer to the object indefinitely. Whether it is Eva Zeissel, Ron Arad, or Michael Graves, the designed object bears the trace of its designer like the half-life of an atomic element. What we conceive, consume, and canonize as 'designer' objects will always have a place outside of, or just beyond, the ordinary. A counter-example to this might be the legendary Machine Art show that Philip Johnson curated at MOMA in the thirties. That show celebrated the beauty and importance of objects whose provenance was invisible (possibly because it predated, to some degree, the 'industrial designer' as a personage). The scientific, engineering, and commercial wares were both museum quality and ordinary and anonymous.

SO?

So what? I have been nagged by this problem of artists making more meaning of everyday objects than industrial designers; but does it mean much to the practice of industrial design? Is this line of questioning just a hollow philosophical exercise? I am prepared to accept that it might be. But I do feel that there is something to be gained by it.

I draw a few small conclusions from this. First of all, I am still convinced that what makes industrial design a fascinating discipline through which to explore some dominant themes of twentieth century life is its capacity to populate our physical and mental world with common and/or extraordinary things. However, I would also suggest that to set as one's mission the creation of the ordinary is historically and philosophically impossible. The ordinary is unreachable by any means except accident. So, since the ordinary is impossible, maybe the 'out of the ordinary' should be the goal.

And here I turn to Rei Kawakubo. Her work at Comme des Garcons sets a standard, I would argue, that navigates between common media (clothing, perfumes) and uncommon, even uncanny, effects. Whether it is her humped clothing that have managed to redraw the boundaries of the human figure, or her Odeur 51 made of burnt rubber, oxygen, and nothing else you would find in an ordinary perfume, she applies the extraordinary to her designs with a touch that is at once strange, unnatural, and alluring. What I look forward to seeing is that her work and other work like it will eventually become our common, everyday, and ordinary material culture. What a strange and interesting world that will be.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS ON HG 99

What I found interesting this Sunday morning is that while I had a hard time coming up with things that really left a mark on me during the presentations, these concluding discussions have been exhilarating. I want to make a few quick hits on things I found interesting rather than pick up on larger, interlacing themes.

1. John Kaliski's comments about experience being a useful category of analysis only if it includes the ‘critical’ is absolutely essential. If designers are to traffic in the creation of experience then we better have a more honed edge to it that simply calling it experience. There is nothing special about experience per se; car advertisers have been creating it by putting sexy women in bikinis on hoods for decades so that we feel more manly when we drive, but that is not a kind of experience I want to perpetuate. So experience to me must be tied up with a notion of criticality.

2. I enjoyed Bruce's description of networked appliances quarreling and fighting with one another. I think this whole networked appliance thing is overheated and technology driven, and I hope that we can make some judicious use of the technology rather than just wiring up the whole damn universe simply because we can. I will also long remember his adage that 3 big loads of money shut you up. I wish that that would change, somehow, but it rarely seems to.

3. I am still puzzling through Tucker's almost mystical Good-Bad continuum. What I appreciate about it, though, is that it reminds us of the unplanned consequences of our actions. Control is an illusion, and it makes more sense to be aware of that and its repercussions than to ignore it.

4. Finally, I am encouraged by Chris's discussion of studio culture and by Laurie's invocation of students letting work do the talking in the studio. What this brings to mind, for me, is the importance of education in the development of design for the future. The exploration of the new, the impossible, the strange; the creation of new collaborative models; the ability to fail and take risks: these are all aspects of the studio that are even heightened further in the educational process. This is one way that design can give back and do more to positively change society. I am glad to be part of that and glad that the people that Mike and Kathy bring here are not just thinkers, practitioners, and professionals, but they are all also educators in one form or another.

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